and when the fire fades, what then
by TrisakAminawn
Summary: Nanaki just wants to talk. About a shared experience. Aerith never talks about her problems if she can help it, and this is a subject she has particularly emphatically repressed.


**and when the fire fades, what then?**

_**A/N: **__This is the first of my two fills for the ffvii 2019 fanwork exchange on AO3. For SeventhStrife's prompt._

_Fire does 50% damage against desert sahuagins, which look way more like turtles than frogs, Yuffie._

* * *

They pushed on a little too long today, their second day of travel after leaving Cosmo Canyon—red stone had begun to give way to thicker and greener grasses, and Barret was optimistic that they could make the southern bank of the River Ripple before nightfall, and spend the night in a hostel in one of the riverside barge-towns.

His optimism has been proven misplaced, and Tifa and Cloud together overruled any attempt to press on through the dark. The roads in this part of the world are bad, where they exist at all, and the last thing they need is to foul an axel.

They were lucky their last breakdown happened so close to Nanaki's home, where they could hire young Artur to fix it.

(Alright, Artur is coming on forty, he isn't young anymore. But Nanaki remembers helping to mind him when he was a cub of fourteen himself, and pushing him down when he first got up on two feet because he liked the four-footed company of human children that were still crawling.)

Sunset deepened through twilight as they finished making camp, and Aerith is finding her way back from a latrine visit by the werelight of a little half-cast Cure she's holding in her left hand, when Nanaki intercepts her in the gloom.

"Nanaki," she greets, letting the spell die now that he's standing there, with his perpetual light source held between them, curled low to the ground so that it paints her face faintly gold from below. She started using his real name as soon as she knew it, after Hadi at the gate told everyone, but watched him carefully the first few times she did, in case he minded. At least, he thinks that's why.

"Aerith." Sitting, he tries to keep his tail curled politely around his feet, and his ears from flattening at all. Many humans have a hard time reading him, he's noticed, even some of the ones who grew up with him, but Aerith he is fairly certain will notice if he lets himself be visibly nervous. "Do you have a moment?"

"Sure. Did you get bitten by a scorpion?" she teases. She has the party's only Heal in her keeping, but Nanaki is thirty-some years from being a cub who might tangle with a scorpion without knowing what it was, and get carelessly stung.

(Scorpions of course do not bite, but Aerith is from Midgar, and can't be expected to be an expert in wildlife; he does not correct her.)

"No," he says with careful dignity.

He pulled his dignity around him like a straw cloak, at first, just trying to survive the strange, Planet-killing human world that did not see him as a person, but it became easier to relax as he got to know his new comrades. Now that Grandpa has told them he's not quite an adult he almost regrets that carelessness, but…it's better to be able to trust.

Aerith, though, it took him days to be able to look straight at, even after they escaped Midgar together; he was glad when Barret suggested they split up on the way to Kalm, and Cloud put him and Aerith in separate parties. They met under some of the worst possible circumstances, and while it seemed like the best strategy at the time, to play the mindless beast and convince Hojo to underestimate him…he did not acquit himself well toward her.

She's strong, he knows that. He doesn't believe he scared her too terribly. But the more he had time to think about what happened in that lab, the more playing along with a threat centering around…_reproduction_…seems like it was a poor decision.

And really, he just wants to talk to someone who will _understand_.

"I was hoping we could talk," he says. "About…Hojo?" He tilts his head to get a better look at Aerith's face when she doesn't respond right away, and then suddenly she _does_.

"Oh wow look at the time!" she bursts out, checking a wristwatch that isn't there. She's smiling more widely than she ever does when she means it. "I just have to urgently…say a thing. To Tifa. Before she goes to sleep."

"_Aerith._" Nanaki feels his tail lash and watches the light it sheds dance wildly as she turns her back on him. The amount of reproach in his voice surprises even him—it isn't as though he didn't avoid talking about it _himself_, until now. He understands it's an uncomfortable subject. But if she'd approached _him_ about it, and he hadn't been willing or able to make the necessary effort, he'd at least have _said_ so. Is that so hard? 'I don't want to talk about it?'

He expects her to go on walking away from him, no matter what he says or how, but after he says her name she slows, until she's stopped. She's almost halfway between him and the fire at the middle of their campsite, now. "It's fine," she says. He can't see her face. It wouldn't tell him much, anyway, he thinks. Aerith is only a mediocre liar, but she's a very good keeper of secrets. "You didn't do anything wrong."

His tail lashes again as he stands up, and sends dancing shadows over the rocks and the back of her flower-pink frock. "I know that," he says. Grandfather reassured him already, as well, in his peculiar indirect way—no one at home thinks Nanaki was even at fault for letting himself be captured, and he _knows_ he made avoidable errors then.

It is nice, though, to have his apology from all those weeks ago finally accepted. "Aerith, what Shinra did, to us—"

"It's the same thing they always do," Aerith says, and at least the awful false cheer is gone from her voice but what remains is dry and sere—a cruel emptiness, like the wastelands around Midgar, not like the familiar warm stone of his homeland. "We aren't special, Red. Not really."

They are, though. Aren't they. The last of their peoples, and he hates that it was Hojo who placed them together under that banner, Hojo with his grotesque imagination and demands that were too objectifying to be even truly prurient. So that now he can't try to bridge the space between them with that shared solitude, without it being another thing to cringe away from. Tainted by associations. He scuffs with a forepaw, letting his claws catch reassuringly at the grain of the stone.

She hasn't left.

"You don't want to talk about it?" he asks, and again because he has come to trust these people so well and so quickly there's more tone than he intended. A shadow of the forlorn howling that ripped its way out of him as he stood at his father's living grave, and understood that he had carried a burden of shame and rage so long for no reason at all.

"What is there to say? It happened. It's over. There's no point thinking about it anymore."

Considering what a waste it was to dwell on Seto as long as he did, Nanaki knows he can't pretend to be the expert in what's worth hanging on to. But he _is_ older than Aerith, even if he's not an adult. "I don't think that's how it works," he says.

"It's going to have to be," says Aerith, and then she's walking again, rapidly step after step, sharp arc around the campfire to Tifa's tent, and crawling in under the flap.

Barret and Cloud, who were still crouched in the circle of firelight through all that, are looking at him, now. Barret squinting as though it will help him figure out what Nanaki did to scare the party healer away, Cloud just puzzled, his head at a tilt, his mouth pursed. It's an odd, subtle expression, but Nanaki knows how to read human faces.

He thinks, if he were ever to find himself miraculously in a mixed group of his own people and the human race…he'd find the humans easier to understand. When he was thirty, and first realized that—that he had almost forgotten his mother's face, the tilt of her ears and the timbre of her growl—he cried for weeks.

(That seems so long ago, now. Aerith and Cloud and Tifa would have been babies then, or not yet born, and he doesn't think Barret's much older.)

At least it's not Yuffie. He's not sure where she's run off to, as usual, but he hates it when she laughs at him. Unlike Barret and Cloud, too, she hasn't shown the party her heart's wounds, assuming she has any. It makes it harder to be vulnerable in front of her. He pads toward the fire. "What was that about?" Barret asks, jerking his head toward the tent.

"Aerith didn't want to talk," Nanaki says, laying his belly in the dust. It's a warm night, but not so warm the fire isn't comforting. Neither griffons or wolves like fire, and here where their ranges overlap it's a defense against both—though if any sahuagins come this far north, _they_ never mind fire.

"She loves talking," Barret says, still squinting.

"Not," says Cloud, "about anything important." His back is to Tifa's tent, and his voice is soft like it often gets at night, when there's nothing he needs to be brave or certain about, but it's likely Aerith can still hear him, and Nanaki's foreclaws dig into the ground for a second.

"It was…important," he admits. In the sense Cloud meant, at least. It wasn't a _practical _matter, admittedly. He shakes out his crest. "I wanted to talk about the Shinra labs."

Barret's squint falls away into a sort of frown. "Oh. Yeah," he tells the fire, "that would be…bad, I bet. For her."

Cloud seems to agree and Nanaki feels his ears folding back. "_Why?_ It was bad, of course, it was terrible, but what makes her so different from me that I should have known not to ask?"

"Oh…right," says Barret. "You wouldn't know, would you."

"According to what her mother said," says Cloud, before Nanaki can grow any more frustrated. "That…wasn't the first time they had her. She escaped from them before, as a little girl."

"Her real mom died," says Barret quietly, and though Nanaki has never met the child he knows Barret is thinking of Marlene, his little daughter whose birth father they all watched throw himself into death not long ago, in the ruins of Barret's home.

Nanaki might as well have tried to relate to the heartbreaking story of how Barret lost his hand and almost everyone and everything he loved with the account of how _he_ got careless fighting griffons when he was twenty, and got slashed across the eye.

He lays his head on his paws. "Thank you for telling me," he says.

Cloud nods, and Barret mutters something about the team all being on the same page.

* * *

Nanaki doesn't carry a tent—it seems foolish to, when he can't set it up himself, and usually doesn't see the need. In the worst rains, he will borrow Cloud's spare or someone will invite him to squash in with them, but otherwise he lies beside the fire, and is well content. The smell of wood smoke is enough to make him feel at home.

Whoever has the current night watch always does their best not to disturb him, unless it's Yuffie, who's been known to poke him awake at midnight to ask him a question. He doesn't really mind. Falling asleep and waking up have always been easy for him, and he's made them easier still with careful training—it's an important skill for a warrior.

Also, he can't drive, so he gets to nap in the car a lot during the day.

Yuffie had the midnight watch today and Aerith has dawn, and he's spent the last hour pretending to sleep. He watches through his one slitted eye as Yuffie sticks her head and shoulders into Tifa's tent to poke her relief awake.

Tifa always has extra blankets, but the small tent must have still been crowded for two. Nanaki hopes Tifa helped Aerith feel better, and didn't mind sharing her tent too much.

"I'm gonna go see what I can steal from those frog monsters," Yuffie announces in a hushed voice. No one will let her drive, either, even though she has thumbs—technically she's of age but Cloud says she has to get her own car to practice in before she can drive the group buggy—so she sleeps a lot during the day, too. Or maybe she's powered by materia, like Cait Sith's moogle. "Anyone want to come?"

Nanaki continues to pretend to sleep, and Yuffie shrugs and lopes off into the night. She'll be back by breakfast, she always is.

He slits his eye carefully open and waits for Aerith to start to crawl out of the tent. She's taking enough care that Tifa is probably still asleep. Good.

"Aerith," he whispers, and she jumps, bangs her elbow gently on the tent frame, and bites her own lip. Checks under her own arm to make sure Tifa slept through that, too, and looks relieved.

Ambush successful.

When he already feels bad for putting her in an uncomfortable position earlier, maybe it's just making it worse to plan an ambush, but it's not easy to get anyone alone while they're all traveling together even if the other person is _cooperating_, and he can't leave it like this.

He raises his head from his paws. "I'm sorry about earlier. You don't have to talk about it with me if you don't want to. I…understand now that I don't really understand, what it was like for you."

He can't read her face, in the shadows. Raises his tail to shed more light, but it doesn't really help. "But," he says, "things don't _really_ stop mattering just because they're over. You know that, right?"

Aerith scowls at him, for a second, then sighs, as though it's not worth being annoyed about. But she doesn't answer. She finishes crawling out of the tent instead, and stays on her knees just outside it, pushing her hair into order around her face.

"I don't know how long Cetra live," Nanaki tells her, "But I know the limits of humans. If I'm not killed, I'll still be alive when Cloud and Tifa and Barret and Yuffie have gone back into the Lifestream, and vanished. Will they not matter anymore? Just because they're gone?"

Aerith closes her eyes. Almost, he thinks she's not going to say anything, and tries to resign himself to only this much of the conversation. At least he said what was most important.

Then, almost too soft to hear: "…it would be easier that way."

"It would," Nanaki admits. They've all known loss, Aerith it turns out not least among them, and the tightness within his own chest at the thought of how Grandpa's every day wears out a little more of his time, time that's already carried him far past what should have been his limits—he is sure it is no different than a human or a Cetra feels. Surely.

But everyone he knew as a child is dead or old now, and he knows he could never give up what he has left of them. "But…" He can't ask if she _really_ feels nothing any longer for her first mother. He has no right to ask that. And if she said yes, what could he possibly respond?

"But it's not how it is," Aerith admits. "People who have left us…even though they've returned to the Planet. Even once we can't hear their voices any longer. They do matter."

He has never before seen this woman look as though she might cry. It is a fragile, midnight thing, like moonlight caught in dew beading on spider gossamer, and it seems ridiculous of him to have ever expected her to talk about something painful in twilight, a stone's throw from their watching friends.

"They do," he agrees, and thinks of Seto, trapped within his dead stone self, gone but not at rest, weeping.

The comb in his hair weighs very little, but feels heavier than a mountainside. But it is a good weight. It is the presence of someone he lost, who is less lost to him now than he was a week ago, because now he carries the memory close to his heart. "But sometimes I wonder what we can do for them, besides remember."

Aerith says, "Protect the things they loved. Like Barret does. Fight the things that hurt them. Like Cloud, and everyone. And…live. As long as we can, as happily as we can. For the sake of the ones who loved us. I know…that's what they'd want."

"…yes," Nanaki agrees again. "But also…don't forget."

"We have to remember," Aerith nods. "Because…we're the ones who are left." She looks at him as she says it, eyes flickering jungle-emerald in the low light of the campfire and Nanaki's own flame, and he understands that by 'we' she means _you and I, the last of our kind, who must carry the memories of all our vanished people though we were too young to learn the lore when we were left lorn and lone._

It is the most he has ever heard her say about being one of the vanished Ancient ones.

(He'd thought she would at least say something to Grandpa, once the Gaia Life Theory was explained, but of course now he knows why she wouldn't. Grandpa is good and wise and devoted to the Canyon and the Planet, but still he is a scientist. And once—too long ago by far to have had anything to do with hurting Aerith, Nanaki assures himself—he worked for Shinra.)

"Yes," he says once more.

Aerith stands, now, brushing dust from her skirt, and comes to join him at the fireside. She sits close, rather than facing him across the embers as though to talk, and he knows he is forgiven.

* * *

Nanaki is woken in the morning by Aerith's voice greeting the rest of camp against a background of familiar songbirds, and opens his eye from a deeper sleep than he's used to, to the sight of Cloud looking relieved. Aerith is a warm weight against his right flank, guarding his blind side, and he twists his head around to get a look at her.

She's re-braided her hair, all the flyaways tamed back inside her ribbon, and he can feel the strangely floppy weight of plaits braided into his own crest. He can't believe he slept through that. Maybe she cast Sleep on him, but he thinks he just…felt safe.

"Let's get some breakfast together," she says, smiling.

You'd never think she'd had anything bad happen to her in her life.

"I found mushrooms!" volunteers Yuffie.

"_Never. Again_," says Cloud. Nanaki sympathizes completely.

"Let me look," says Tifa. "She might have actually gotten some edible ones this time, and we're close enough to home they might be ones I recognize."

"That's a lot of 'might,'" says Barret.

"But mushroom omelets!" says Yuffie, and dumps her string bag of fungi out onto one of the broad flat stones that make the border of the firepit, for inspection.

Aerith rises up on her knees to get a better look at the mushrooms, but doesn't move away, the pressure of her calf still warm against his ribs, and Nanaki lays his head back down, to drowse to the comfortable sound of his friends arguing about breakfast.

Everything's going to be okay.


End file.
